Moving in on Missoula

Today we traveled from Spokane, Washington, to Missoula, Montana -- just not right away. The first thing we had to do was track down a new gas cap for the motor home. Yesterday, realizing that sometimes it becomes necessary to share the wealth, I decided to be magnanimous and leave my gas cap atop the pump in the Shell station in Ellensburg, Washington. I'm sure it was found soon after by someone who desperately needed just that design of cap. I felt good about it all day. But before we could hit the road this morning we had to track down an RV center (they had no caps) and then an auto parts store so that we wouldn't be strewing gasoline down the interstate and maybe get pulled over for polluting. Once that chore was complete, we were able to gas up and be off. My new cap is a locking one so that I can leave the keys in the cap and thus be reminded to return it to its natural place.

Our next goal, once we ventured out of Washington and into Idaho was to find my long lost buddy, Pete Blackmore, who, along with his wife of many years, had left the over-crowded confines of Carson City back in the nineties and moved up to the pristine environs of lake Couer d' Alene in Idaho. Specifically, he was living in the tiny (population 200+) town of Harrison just south of Couer d' Alene itself. Man, what a wonderfully beautiful place!!! You leave the interstate and wind your way slowly slowly for miles around the lake on a tiny two-lane road. It's a little hair raising in a thirty-foot motor home but the scenery is definitely worth it.

Pete, a native of Thetford, England, had worked with me at a printing establishment for all of my nine years in the business. In fact, Pete and I had at one time been offered ownership of the business when the owner retired. But along came an offer of a state government position and away I went, never to hang around with Pete again. I've been sending him Christmas cards for years but all I had was a post office box. Still, I thought that since the town was so small more than one person would be able to tell me where to find him.

As fate would have it, Concetta and I stopped in an ice cream parlor and asked to see their phone book. I easily picked out Pete's number and dialed the phone. Unfortunately, only his son, Simon, was home and I soon learned that Pete and his wife were off to Couer d' Alene to do the weekly shopping. Much disappointed, we headed back to the motor home parked right on the main street. As we approached we passed a woman putting the finishing touches on her sidewalk sign advertising her Wine-tasting shop. As we lingered there next to the motor home the woman stood, and came toward us. I recognized her instantly as Pete's daughter, Julie, whom I hadn't seen since she was a young girl but whom I instinctively recognized. "Are you Julie," I asked as she came abreast of us.

She got a big smile on her face and said, "Yes. Do I know you?"

I proceeded to tell her about my association with her dad and we soon fell into a lively conversation about Carson City and what her family had been up to all these years. During the course of the conversation Julie invited us up to her wine shop and we spent a lovely half hour sampling her supply of "fruit" wines, not derived from grapes. The wine was wonderful, had about 14% alcohol, and we selected a couple of different flavors (pear and Italian plum) and thanked Julie for a very nice experience.

The town had a very nice picnic area just up slope from the lake and we spent an additional half hour eating lunch before we packed up and headed back toward the interstate and our intended route to Montana. We arrived in camp here in Missoula about 5:00 p.m. and Concetta immediately set about fixing some lovely trout given to me by my buddy, Jeff, from Public Safety, some chard from our garden back home, salad, and a bottle of Menage a Trois. For dessert, we had more blackberries carefully (and painfully) picked by the roadside in Oregon.

The motor home is behaving very well and I'm getting quite comfortable handling it. I even had to back it into the camp spot tonight which went off without a hitch. My only complaint is that in order to make our rendezvous in Ohio sometime after the 12th I'm having to bypass a lot of stuff I'd really like to stop and see. Of course the downside is that there would be days that I wouldn't get anywhere at all. The route we're taking is truly beautiful. We've never spent any time in the Pacific northwest and the area obviously deserves a lot more attention in the future. I'm not exactly sure where we're going tomorrow except to say I'm headed toward the Custer battlefield national park in Montana and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Beyond that, who knows. I do have a date to visit George (Legislature workmate) Aldrich's mother in Wisconsin, so we'll be heading generally in that direction.

I've tried numerous times to upload photos for this segment of the blog, but the WiFi connection here at the Missoula RV park refuses to let me for some reason. So, until next time, I bid you ciao and great traveling.